


Office Hours

by GrayJay



Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Astonishing X-Men - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-26
Updated: 2015-02-26
Packaged: 2018-03-15 08:01:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3439640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GrayJay/pseuds/GrayJay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>“Do you ever get used to it?” she asks.</em>
</p><p>Scott, Kitty, and the people they've left behind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Office Hours

**Author's Note:**

> Somewhere very early in _Astonishing X-Men_ vol. 1.

Scott finds Kitty fast asleep on his office couch. He considers waking her up--Scott takes locks seriously, and he knows she knows that; but that also means she wouldn’t have phased through the door if she didn’t have a good reason.

So he lets her sleep and starts into the pile of syllabi on his desk. He needs to get around to finishing his own, eventually: running the school is supposed to mean a reduced course load, but he’ll end up with Trig whether he wants it or not, and he won’t give up Auto Shop no matter how much it cuts into administrative hours or how much Emma complains about his hands. Maybe _because_ she complains; for all her sophistication, Emma loves like a ten-year-old boy, all barbs and hair-pulling.

He’s a little surprised Kitty still hasn’t worked that one out, considering.

The light from the window hits the couch, and Kitty grumbles and stirs. “Morning,” says Scott, and stifles a smile as she jumps and swears before she sits up, rubbing her eyes.

“Morning.”

“Sleep well?” He doesn’t bother to press the point; it’s not like they don’t both know where she is.

She shrugs, yawns. “What time is it?”

“Half-past seven.”

She groans. “That’s inhumane.”

Scott considers pointing out that she has a bedroom with blinds, but just shrugs and goes back to the syllabi--typed except for Logan’s, which are written out on yellow legal paper in preternaturally neat Palmer script.

“ _I Am a Cat_ ,” he reads aloud.

“What?” asks Kitty.

“I think it’s a novel,” Scott tells her. He had been pleasantly surprised when Logan suggested a Japanese Lit course--Scott picked the faculty for a balanced field team, not for a balanced course breakdown, and they’ve ended up with too much STEM and not enough humanities. Still, he has to fight down the impulse to track down copies of everything on Logan’s book list before he signs off on the syllabus; even though he’s pretty sure that vetting for age-appropriate material is pointless at a school where Emma Frost teaches ethics--Scott may be heavily biased on that front, but he’s still not _stupid_ \--and half the student body has literally been through Hell. 

“Oh,” Kitty says. “Natsume Sōseki. Yeah.” She’s still just sitting there, hugging a throw pillow, and he wonders if she’s waiting for him to ask what she’s doing there; or if maybe she chose his office because she figured he wouldn’t ask. He’s not sure if it’s even really his place to. They’ve never been close--she came in as he was leaving, and by the time he came back, she was firmly under Logan’s wing.

Instead, he flips back to her A.P. Physics syllabus--the first one in, already covered in his green ink. “You know you’re going to have to either scale this down or divide it into basic and advanced sections.”

She nods. “I figured. Wishful thinking.” He wonders if she gets frustrated teaching teenagers--with her brains and credentials, she should really be at MIT or Berkeley, or holed up in the Baxter Building breaking the laws of reality with Reed, not back at her high school. Scott suspects she wouldn’t tell him if she were, but he makes a mental note to talk to Hank to keep an eye out; he hates the idea of anyone trapped here.

For now, he offers: “We’ve got a handful of kids who placed out of Calc. Hank was talking about a tutorial, but maybe you could team-teach and make the advanced course interdisciplinary--practical applications, something like that? It’s way out of my depth, but there’s not much one or the other of you isn’t equipped to cover, and we could get a lineup of guest lecturers so it wouldn’t add too much to your load.”

She nods. “Sounds good. I can get a list to you by Wednesday--Reed for multiversal physics, obviously; and there’s a great time guy at UC. Do we have a budget for honoraria?”

“We can,” he tells her. “Can you get me a budget proposal along with the list? I’ll talk to Hank, see if he's game.”

“Yeah,” she says. “No problem.”

Scott turns back to the syllabi, and they sit in silence for a few minutes before Kitty speaks up again, “Hey, Scott?”

“Mm?” he says.

“Do you ever miss her?”

He doesn’t have to ask who she’s talking about. “Every day.”

Kitty looks down, worries at the edge of her pillow. “I thought it’d be easier, y’know, being back.”

“Oh,” says Scott. “Yeah. Lots of ghosts.” Suspects she’s thinking of Piotr and Illyana, but he’s not going to go there unless she does.

“Do you ever get used to it?” she asks.

He shrugs. “I don’t know. I--” and isn’t sure where to go from there. They’ve never been close, but he's watched Kitty grow up through a dozen years of teams and codenames and heartbreaks; and sometimes he forgets that that door doesn’t go both ways. He knows each generation of students has its rumors, and that some of them are always about him, but he’s never really bothered to find out what they were, or what Ororo or Ray might have let slip to Kitty. (And now that he’s thinking about it, he’s not sure how much Ray really knows about his life before the school, how much she’s pulled out of his mind or how much her real dad might have told her about his childhood--probably not a lot, if he had much in common with the Scott of this world.) “I don’t know if I’m the best person to ask about that, Kitty. I was--I’d lost a lot of people before I even got here. But no. I don’t think you ever really get used to it. You just get better at pushing on anyway.”

Her shoulders droop. “I keep thinking I should be used to it. Yana, and Pete, and Doug, and my dad; and everyone always says things like _give it time_ , but it’s been _years_ , and--Doug and I carved our initials in the corner of the computer lab, after that summer we pretty much lived there, and I checked yesterday, and they were still--and it was like--I just lost it. Crying under the damn table. Lucky none of the kids came in.”

“Yeah,” says Scott. “It’s never really as simple as they say, is it?” 

Kitty snorts. “No. At least you got to say goodbye this time. That has to count for something, right?” He’s surprised she comes right out and says it, and he’s not sure why--if maybe he was expecting her to have softened with time. Now, though, she looks uncertain, like she suspects she’s crossed a line. “Sorry. That was--sorry.”

“No,” he says. “It’s okay.” Because this is his job, or close enough; and because even if they’ve never been close, he asked her to come be on the team, and she said yes; and because it’s not like he doesn’t know what everyone thinks, but they still walk on eggshells around him until he wants to scream, wants to call a school meeting and say _I loved my wife, and I love Emma, and it’s none of your goddamn business either way_. Of course that’s not what Kitty’s asking about, exactly; but he appreciates that at least she came right out and _asked_.

“It counts for something,” he tells her. “Fewer regrets, maybe? But it doesn’t make me miss her any less.”

“But you have Emma,” Kitty says, and she can’t quite keep the bite out of her voice when she says the name. _No wonder she’s Emma’s favorite_ , he thinks.

“Did you stop missing Illyana because you had Ray?” he asks her. She blinks, startled, and he realizes what he’s just implied. “Sorry. I didn’t mean--”

“No,” she says, “it’s okay.” He’s not sure if she’s confirming his suspicion, or brushing off the faux pas, and he’s _definitely_ not going to start down that road, today or any other day. He worries for a moment that he’s being remiss in his nebulous alternate-universe dad duties, then decides that it’s really none of his business. And anyway, he’s still hoping that Ray might change her mind and talk to him again. Someday.

“Right,” he says. “Well. Anyway. What I’m saying is, it’s not a zero-sum equation. You don’t trade people in like cars or old couches. You don’t stop loving someone just because they’re not there and someone else has moved in. Especially not--” and he stops there, because this isn’t something he talks about, not to Kitty, not to anybody. What it meant to be _Scott and Jean_ , even in the bad times; how hard they’d fought for it-- _through death and through life_ , he thinks. That he still remembers every word of those vows. How long it took, and how hard it was, and how even when things were falling apart, he still couldn’t imagine living without being able to reach his mind out and feel the comforting and constant touch of hers. How even if they’d split, they’d still have--

Kitty’s staring at him, and he realizes he’s gotten lost mid-sentence. Tries to remember where he’d been-- _Emma and Jean_ , right. “Emma’s not a replacement for Jean. She’s Emma. It’s not--I don’t expect you to like her. But don’t--what happened there. That was my fault. Do you understand?”

Kitty rolls her eyes and snorts again “Don’t worry. I have more than enough reasons to dislike Emma without dragging you into it.” For a moment, she’s so much the teenager he remembers that Scott has to bite back a laugh. 

“Right,” he says. “Yeah. Fair.”

Her eyes narrow. “You never even try to defend her.”

“No,” he says. It’s not quite that simple; but that, he really _isn’t_ going to explain to Kitty. “Like you said. You have your reasons.”

Kitty bites her lip, narrows her eyes. “What about Madelyne?”

He hadn’t seen that one coming, and it stings more than he’s prepared for. “Jesus, Kitty.”

She looks a little sheepish. “Sorry. I just--she seemed so nice. I _liked_ her. I thought you--and then--”

“Wow,” says Scott. He forgets sometimes--how young she was, back then. Remembers Maddy telling him how excited Kitty had been to help her get ready for the wedding. She would have been, what, thirteen? Fourteen? “Yeah,” he tells her. “Maddy, too, although that’s a little more complicated.”

“Because she was evil?” Kitty asks. “Or because she was a clone of Jean?”

“Not exactly,” says Scott. “I mean, obviously, both of those, although she wasn’t really--” Explaining Maddy has never not felt like penance, even though he knows it’s never going to be enough. “And because what happened to her was my fault, a lot of it. Because I was stupid and selfish, and she seemed like--” The X-Men tell two versions of the story, he knows: one where he’s a dupe, and one where he’s a monster. He wonders which one Kitty believes, and whether there’s a way to explain that they’re both pretty much true, but they’re also not really the whole story. “Anyway. Like I said, it’s never really a zero-sum equation.”

“She tried to kill Nathan,” Kitty says, incredulous. “And everybody else. She’s why Yana--” She stops, and can see her fists tighten around the pillow.

“I know,” says Scott. “But she was--I mean, look, I’m not going to try to excuse what she did, or what I did. There’s no excuse. And yes, she was a clone of Jean, and she was a trick and a trap and I still wonder sometimes if I ever really fell in love with her, or if she was just programmed to push every fucked up switch Sinister had planted in my head. But she was real, too. I know that. She was smart and funny and never backed down from a dare. She loved flying, and she knew every Johnny Cash song by heart, and she hardly batted an eye when you handed her a dragon to babysit the first day you met her. She’d buy jellybeans at the store and pick out all the black licorice ones and leave the rest. I think she really loved Nate, before things fell apart. Me, too, maybe, although there’s really no way to know if that was really--I don’t know, Kitty. There’s a lot I don’t know. But, yeah. I miss Maddy, too.”

Kitty doesn’t say anything, and when he looks up, her eyes are shiny with tears, until she sees him looking and rubs them away with a fist. “I kind of get that,” she says. “Yana--” she breaks off, but this time he’s pretty sure he knows where she was going.

“She never really got a fair chance, either, did she?” he says. He never really got to know Illyana; even when he thinks of her now, it’s mostly just as Pete’s kid sister.

“Yeah,” says Kitty. “But who does, really? I mean, look at you and me.”

Scott’s been pretty much done with this game since it started, and he’s running out of patience. “Kitty, what the hell are you doing here?”

“You asked me,” she snaps back.

“Not here at the school. Here. In my office.”

“Oh,” she says. “Yeah. That.” Runs her fingers over the edges of the pillow.

“Is this going to be a thing?” He knows he’s being mean now, but it’s not like she’s been pulling punches, either. “Because if I’m going to have to start every day with you going for the jugular, I should probably start getting to bed earlier.”

“Right,” she says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean--” He sees her shoulders shake, and that’s enough to jar the rest of the anger out of his system. He gives her a minute, then does what he does when students cry in his office: gets up quietly and gets the tissues from the shelf, and sits down on the couch next to her, careful not to touch.

She takes a tissue without looking at him, balls it up in her hand. “I was in my room,” she says. “And it was the same, except it wasn’t, and I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stay there.”

Scott nods. He’s slept on his share of couches and floors, and at least since he was a kid, it’s rarely been because he didn’t have anywhere else to go. “I get that. But why here?”

She blows her nose noisily. “If I’d gone to the den, Logan would have--” she rolls her eyes, waves a hand. “You know. _Logan_. Or Ruth, being all creepy--sorry, I know I shouldn’t call a student creepy, but she keeps sneaking up on me, which she should _not_ be able to do. And you’re the only one who ever locks your door.”

He raises an eyebrow and makes what he thinks of as his headmaster face and Emma calls his bitch face. “I don’t know how they do it in Chicago, Kitty, but where I come from, a locked door usually means someone doesn’t want people coming in.”

“I know,” she says. “I know, I know. I didn’t think, and I’m sorry, and it was stupid, and I shouldn’t have done it, and then I was awful to you all morning. I’m the worst.”

He laughs. “You’re not the worst.”

“No,” she says. “That would be your girlfriend. Who I would really prefer not find out about this, by the way, although I’m sure it’s too late for that. She’s probably already laughing at me somewhere.”

Scott considers being offended, but he’s used enough to that one that it’s not worth the effort. “Emma’s still asleep,” he says. “And I know you all think she’s controlling my mind, but please give me _some_ credit here. I've spent most of my life with the two strongest telepaths in on record--both a hell of a lot stronger than Emma Frost--and more than a decade psychically linked to one of them. I have better shields than most _telepaths_ , Kitty. The only parts of my head Emma gets into these days are the ones I let her into.”

That finally gets a laugh from Kitty. “I didn’t think she was controlling--okay, maybe a little. Not that that’s not exactly what she’d make you say, if she were.”

“Right,” says Scott. “But you know Emma, Kitty. Do you really see her getting up at seven in the morning to tell you that I still miss my dead wives?”

“I don’t know,” says Kitty. “I’m not discounting the possibility. Your girlfriend teaches ethics in her underwear--who the hell knows what kind of weird stuff you two do for kicks.”

Scott shakes his head. “And to think, I thought it was _Emma_ I’d have to have the first professional-boundaries talk with.” He lets Kitty glare for a moment before he finally cracks and laughs. “I’m kidding. Sort of. But if you don’t want me to tell her, I won’t.”

Kitty nods. “I don’t care what she thinks, but I _know_ she’d tell everyone else, and I really don’t want to have that conversation with Logan.”

“No,” says Scott. “I wouldn’t either. Your secret is safe with me.” He leaves the tissue box on the couch and settles back behind his desk--boss, not teacher. “Are you going to be okay, Kitty? If this is something bigger--if you really think you’re not going to be able to handle being here, or if you think there’s any real risk of you freezing up or breaking down in the field--I need to know. I’m not going to judge, and I’ll trust your call on this, but I need you to level with me now, before lives are on the line.”

Kitty nods, closes her eyes, takes a deep breath. “I’ll be okay. I mean, it’s a relative state, but--yeah. I’m good.” She finally stands up and straightens her shirt. “I should probably shower and get changed before everyone else wakes up.

“Probably,” says Scott. He rarely opens the smaller drawer under his desk, and the buttons jam the first time he presses in the combination, so Kitty’s already halfway out the door by the time he finds what he’s looking for and tosses it to her. “Here.”

Kitty snatches the key out of the air. “What’s this for?”

“So you won’t have to go through the wall next time,” Scott tells her. Considers telling her to be careful with it, but really, if he’s going to trust her with it in the first place--and replacing locks is easy enough, if it comes down to it.

Kitty turns away, not quite quickly enough for him to avoid a glimpse of her face starting to crumple again. When she says, “Thanks,” her voice sounds a little choked.

“You’re welcome,” Scott says, and flips to the next syllabus.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [It's Not a Choice](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12996738) by [KittyViolet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KittyViolet/pseuds/KittyViolet)




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